After a long awards season that wrapped up last weekend with the Oscars, you’re probably due for a palate cleanser – you know, a film whose runtime isn’t insurmountably long, doesn’t ask you to search for deeper meaning and can feasibly be watched while scrolling Instagram. Luckily, “Arthur the King” hits theaters March 15.
At the very least, dog movies, as a rule, get added to a To-Be-Watched list simply because of the presence of said dog. I’m not saying they’re going to be blockbuster hits, but we typically deem minutes of a dog movie watched time well spent. The same is true for “Arthur the King” – am I going to submit it for an Academy Award? No. But I’ll totally recommend it to anyone looking for a cutesy, low-stakes date night.
At just 90 minutes, “Arthur the King” covers its plot succinctly, never drawing anything out and not leading with so much unnecessary exposition. Although our protagonists – who rendezvous to run an adventure race in the Dominican Republic – don’t actually meet the titular street dog until about halfway through the movie, there’s no sense of, “Get on with it!”, which is nice.
The protagonists in question are based on real people, by the way – Mark Wahlberg is Michael Light, aka Mikael Lindnord, the IRL adventure racer the story is based on (also the author of the book that inspired the film, “Arthur: The Dog Who Crossed the Jungle to Find a Home”). Michael’s racing team is filled out by Simu Liu, Nathalie Emmanuel and Ali Suliman – with Wahlberg, these are four people I never would have put together, but they work! Liu is delightful, per usual, as a racer-turned-influencer who loves Instagram as much as winning; Emmanuel (who I’ll never not see as Missandei of “Game of Thrones”) is a free climber with, for lack of a better term, balls of steel; and Suliman makes a cheeky addition as the team’s master navigator.
Wahlberg, in true Wahlberg fashion, is given a hero edit – he’s the one keeping the team together during the race while never once getting any actual rest or aid himself, which is par for the course for Marky Mark, anyway. And one could say his dramatics in the more emotional scenes re: Arthur are a bit, well, too dramatic, but that’s Wahlberg – we take him for who he is.
The true hero, of course, is Arthur, who traverses the island nation right alongside his new human BFFs. The real feat, though, as with any dog movie, is Arthur’s ability to burrow himself right into your heartstrings with a simple tail wag – and a weird CGI moment that we’ll let you process for yourself.
Sure, the dialogue is a little contrived, the entire plot predictable, Wahlberg’s beard so unkempt that it’s honestly distracting (seriously, who in the hair and makeup department can I talk to about that?), but “Arthur the King” is a sweet escape about the lengths we’d all go to for a little glory and a lot of love.